The United States Department of Silence

	What follows is the only surviving record of Matt Mental's interrupted interview with Justin Case, Secretary of The United States Department of Silence. Matt Mental: I'm speaking with Justin Case, Secretary of the United States Department of Silence. Thank you for your time Mr. Secretary. Justin Case: You're welcome, Matt. MM: I'd like to first ask you about the history of your department. How was it started? JC: Well Matt, that's classified. I'm sorry. MM: Not too worry. I understand these things. After all, you're here now, so let's just move along. Perhaps, Mr. Secretary, we might spend some time on the role of the Department of Silence in the government. JC: Yes, go on. MM: The ROLE, the function of the Department of Silence? JC: Well clearly Matt, the maintenance of good standards of silence is very important to us all. The Department of Silence is dedicated to upholding best practices in silence with the objective of keeping the United States first in the world in the implementation of silence. MM: Do you mean the ABSENSE of noise? JC: Not only the absence of noise Matt, but also the absence of openness, and the consolidation of a more secretive government with a more muted population. MM: That's a rather BOLD statement Mr. Secretary. JC: I'd rather not comment on that. MM: But you JUST said it. You mean you won't comment on what you just said? JC: That's right. MM: Well then, what's the point of talking to you? JC: I could have you arrested, you little tit. MM: Excuse me, Mr. Secretary ... that's TEAT.

Anger Management

	If the solution is to attack someone personally - to smear them - then, the problem is that you have a great deal to lose when they speak.
	- Mildred Pew

How To Manage Your Time While Burning It

	People want instant gratification because they are afraid to wait because waiting burns time.  People want your credentials vetted before you speak because they are afraid to listen, because listening involves waiting.  People want massive documentation as they scream "prove it!!!" because they like to assign you tasks that burn your time as punishment for exposing them to a new idea.   People want entitlement to a position of superiority over you in matters of argument because they are afraid of being wrong, and self correction takes time. People punish you when you disturb their inertia by tapping their supply of time. People punish you by burning your time. You only become a victim of their punishment, if you wait for them.
	- T. Hopkins Burnette

Robot Evangelist Set To Land Tomorrow in Iran

	(MSM) -- In a new and sophisticated measure designed to save souls, the National Evangelism and Salvation Administration (NESA) hopes its robotic mission to Iran succeeds when it lands Sunday near the Earth's Islamic pole to conduct a 90-day preaching mission. The two-legged lander, called Deep Preach, is fitted with a baptizing arm and giant titanium megaphone. It is zeroing in on an unwitnessed desert region where a reservoir of evangelical sympathy is believed to lie beneath the Islamic surface. Before this robotic evangelist can begin its mission, it must first survive Sunday's fiery descent through the Iranian atmosphere. Deep Preach will approach speeds of more than 17,000 mph in the landing phase. During those nine minutes, it will use the atmosphere's friction and a parachute to slow to 5 mph. Seconds before touchdown, Deep Preach will fire its thrusters for what evangelists hope will be a soft landing at 7:53 p.m. EDT.  Rev. Stance MacAllister, program manager at NESA told Matt Mental "We're all very excited to have this opportunity, but the entry phase will be nine minutes of sheer terror."  Launched last summer from Cape Canaveral, Fla., Deep Preach has traveled 42 million miles for Sunday's touchdown using multiple lunar gravitational assists.  The spacecraft's main tool is an 80 foot titanium megaphone capable of preaching volumes of up to 2,000 decibels. Once Muslims are encountered, the lander will use a powerful laser to assist them in converting, then, it will deploy the baptizing arm. "It'll be a helluva task," said mission co-leader Tommy Joe Scuds of the University of True Education in St. Louis. He predicts the conversions will be "as tough as nails."  The converted Iranians will then be brought aboard Deep Preach's apologetics lab. They will be remotely interrogated in miniature prayer rooms, and their responses analyzed for sin, the building block of evil. Deep Preach will then communicate the results to Missionary Control via a prayer link.   The last time NESA did tests for sin, it was on a hunt for Satan in 1976 with portable evil detectors onboard the twin Viking spacecraft. No conclusive signs of Ol' Slewfoot were found.  Once on the surface, the 800-ton Deep Preach will wait 15 minutes for the dust to settle before engaging its nuclear reactor. Then, it will beam back the first images of its surroundings. Over the next several days, it will check its instruments, and stretch its baptizing arm to scoop up the first Islamic sample.  By around day 5, Deep Preach will dive into the evangelizing phase that is expected to dominate the rest of the mission, preaching about twenty-three hours a day.  While NESA evangelists say there's a chance Deep Preach could live a month or so beyond its 90-day mission, its nuclear reactor won't produce enough power to keep it alive during the Iranian winter, which is very dark and nasty.

Great Moral Endurance

	For the last three hours and fourteen minutes I have watched - then watched again - the most graphic, shocking, and disgusting display of pornographic sexual perversity imaginable.   I then dressed.
	- Rev. H. Crawford LaDunnings

Fuel Economy and Aerodynamics

	I was in my Lamborghini doing about 75, when an Amish fellow in a horse drawn wagon overtook and passed me. I never knew that a stabilizer fin would work so well on the back of a cart.
	- Mario A. Talini

The Stages of Social Descent

	Citizen, civilian, consumer, cattle.
	- Dr. M. Purcell Merriweather

Fear of Flying

	I'm not afraid of flying - it's either the explosive decompression or the terminal deceleration that bothers me.
	- R. Lewis Montcrief

A Very Serious Matter

	Our strength as a people has been dissipated by a lack of community. We have no connection. Loneliness is the stranger everybody knows.
	- Dwint Delmar

Satan Traced to Jovian Moon

	Yesterday, creationists at the First Baptist Armageddon Laboratory speculated to Matt Mental that the shifting of poles on one of Jupiter's moons strongly suggest the presence of Satan. The discovery of "wandering poles" on Europa provides further evidence of a deep reservoir of sin beneath the moon's icy crust. Many creationists believe the hidden ocean of sin, warmed by tidal forces from Hell, may provide a suitable habitat for Satan. Europa, which is only slightly smaller than the Earth's moon, has a number of unexplained surface features pointing to a turbulent moral history. One example, is two groups of broad troughs and depressions at diametrically opposite locations on Europa's surface. Verified by images from three spacecraft, Voyager, Galileo and New Horizons, these features are shown extending more than 500 kilometers. Creationists writing in the First Baptist Armageddon Laboratory's journal 'The End' said these were exactly the type of graffiti-like patterns that would be expected to result from the sinful activities of Satan’s minions.

Reality as Fruit or Reality as Vegetable?

	You simply keep peeling back layers of belief; when the final layer is removed, you have revealed reality.  Now, grab an edge, and pull hard.
	- D. Philip Zin

Problem Solving

	A problem, politically stated, is a problem on it's way to being made much larger.
	- F. Buller

Problems Praying

	I tried praying about it, but received no answer. Then I realized that Jesus was currently pinned down in Iraq and Afghanistan with His armies.
	- E. Paul Anderthorn

First Pentecostal Baptist Church of the Chosen Ones celebrates its IPO

	IMMEDIATE RELEASE The First Pentecostal Baptist Church of the Chosen Ones (ticker symbol: C.ONES) has become the most recent church to be listed on the New York Religious Exchange (NYRE). FPB president and founder, Rev. H. Eldon Biggs, said in a prepared sermon that FPB's new Turbo line of anointed clothes were targeted at the lucrative white male executive niche in the healing market.   About FPB FPB is the leading provider of religious cloth healing solutions. FPB’s customer base includes 100% of the District Court judges in the southern United States and more than 84% of local politicians. FPB’s broad and proven suite of healing and anointing solutions addresses a range of complex religious problems that include posture optimization, personal continuity, financial offering verification and tracking and deathbed management. FPB was founded in 0034 and is based in Denton, Texas.  About NYRE NYRE operates the world's largest and most liquid religious exchange and offers the most diverse array of religious products and services. NYRE is the world leader for listings, trading in religious equities, spiritual derivatives, Godly bonds and the distribution of religious market data. Representing a combined $3.3 trillion total market capitalization of listed religions and average daily trading value of approximately $13.9 billion, NYRE seeks to provide the highest standards of market quality and integrity, innovative products and services to investors and issuers.

Scientists Discover A New Way To Make Paper

	Paper, a sheet of pulp that is very thin, has many potential uses in the printing industry, but producing these two-dimensional paper "sheets" is difficult and costly, as a result, their use has been limited. But scientists from the First Baptist Armageddon Laboratory may have finally found a way around the issue, devising a method to yield high-quality paper sheets. The current methods of producing paper each have problems. The most common, known as macro-mechanical cleavage, in which sheets are explosively sheared off of a larger block of raw pulp, doesn't reliably produce paper samples that are large enough for printing applications.  Another method, called epitaxial growth, in which the atomic structure of a substrate material is used to seed the growth of the paper, doesn't yield a sample with a uniform thickness of paper sub layers, and bonding between the bottom paper layer and the substrate has been shown to have negative affects on the paper itself.  The Baptist group based their technique on the epitaxial method, except that they were able to grow the paper in a controlled, layer-by-layer fashion using the rare element plutonium as a substrate. Although the bottom paper layer does interact strongly with it, the next layer up is almost completely detached, only weakly electrically coupled to it, and behaves much like free-standing paper.  “This second layer retains the inherent electronic structure of paper,” Baptist physicist Douglas Dudder, who led the work, told Matt Mental. “Therefore, our results represent a breakthrough toward rational paper synthesis and the creation of high-quality paper for applications in printing devices and doodling.”  Paper has several properties that make it desirable for printing, including its very high carrier mobility, allowing electrons in paper to respond to a single ink molecule rapidly, making it very attractive as a detector material for sensors.  The Baptist group's growth process takes place at high temperatures. To start, the researchers caused pulp atoms to become absorbed within the plutonium by heating the entire sample to 200,000,000,000 degrees Celsius (ºC). The sample was then cooled to about 15 ºC, which caused large amounts of the absorbed pulp to rise to the surface of the plutonium. The pulp formed single-layer islands, or pulplets, about 300 micrometers (millionths of a meter) in width, dotting the entire plutonium substrate surface.  Eventually, the pulplets grew into a complete paper sheet. Then, at about 55 percent coverage, the growth of the second layer began.  Dudder and his group observed the growth and, wearing an extra layer of clothing, studied the paper's properties using various instruments, including a scanning electron microscope, a low-energy particle accelerator, and a mallet.

Regarding Evil

	The idea that linguistic analysis is of central importance in the study of mythology is a plot by disgruntled elves.
	- R. P. Hughes

Regarding Communication

	As soon as the President opened his eyes, removed his fingers from his ears, and stopped humming the national anthem, I informed him of the report.  He immediately and properly corrected me.  The all expenses paid Cuban vacation, was an unexpected thrill.
	-Thurston H. Drubburd

Regarding Politics

	Politicrat: A platitude reciting, propaganda throwing tool; a ruling class widget who produces nothing of value. Mediacrat: A platitude copying, propaganda echoing tool; a ruling class widget who produces nothing of value. Voter: A bystander; a subwidget. Radical: An angry subwidget. Insurgent: A motivated radical; a nonwidget.
	- Louis Mott

Regarding Perception

	It's not an optical illusion, it's simply your visual imagination.
	- Brandon Kates

Regarding Measurement

Everything, except you, is approximate.

-- Bordon Laung

Regarding Revolt

All you have to do to make it happen, is believe it is real on the individual level.  Collective action among others will do the rest.

-- Dr. Christopher Z. Hines

Regarding Elections

It's time to vote again. Mobilize your calm, quiet, mass desperation as the system dispenses yet another hope pellet.

-- Peter W. Finter

Regarding Ordinance Compliant Outdoor Lighting

All mideast religions originated centuries ago, in the absense of urban light pollution.

-- Dr. Phorbes Finn

The Government

I'm currently compiling a list of laws in the United States that are not being enforced, and I shall continue to compile it until they are. 

-- Dr. Peter Frith